Microsoft's Mimicker Alarm app for Android makes you perform a task when you wake up

Microsoft has released quite a few apps on non-Windows platforms lately, like Cortana and its Microsoft Selfie app. Today it added one more to the list with Mimicker Alarm.

Mimicker Alarm is a new Android app that aims to help you wake up by making you perform a task when your alarm goes off. There are three different tasks for you to choose from with Mimicker Alarm: Express Yourself, which asks you to take a selfie while matching a suggested emotion like “surprised”; Color Capture, which tasks you with taking a photo of an object that matches the chosen color; and Tongue Twister, which has you repeat a tongue twister phrase.

When your Mimicker Alarm goes off, you can snooze it and delay the game for five minutes or dismiss it to complete the challenge. If you don’t complete the challenge within 30 seconds, though, Mimicker Alarm will assume that you’ve fallen back asleep and will start ringing your alarm again.

The Mimicker Alarm app is now available on Android. The app is meant to help show off Microsoft’s Project Oxford machine learning APIs, which can help apps to understand emotion and speech and use computer vision. Project Oxford APIs also helped to power projects like How-Old.net, a site that was popular last year because it tried to guess how old you looked by viewing a photo of you.

There’s no shortage of alarm clock apps on Android, including the one that’s probably already built into your phone. If you’re looking for an app that’ll make sure that you actually wake up when your alarm goes off rather than letting you hit dismiss and go back to sleep, Mimicker Alarm may be worth a look.

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